The Gaps by Leanne Hall (young adult books to read .TXT) 📗

as hers. She listens carefully as I explain my doubts and my confusion, nodding and laughing and telling me her own stories.

‘I doubt myself almost every day,’ she says. ‘But I remind myself that being a young woman who wants to take pictures of other young women and queer folk and people of colour is enough. Putting my own representation, my own images forward, that’s powerful in itself.’

‘I never thought of it like that.’

‘It’s hard being at the start of practising something creative, knowing you’ve still got a long way to go. Especially if you have big ideas. Can you email me one of those?’

Adut gives me her email address and I send her a pic. My phone is still making the swooshing send sound when a man in a loud tie-dye t-shirt rockets out of the gallery stairwell. When he spots Adut he raises his hands high—WHY?—and pretends to reel her in on an invisible line.

‘Oh, they finally noticed I’m hiding,’ she says. ‘Good luck, Chloe. Thanks for the chat.’

Adut gives me a quick hug and then she’s gone.

I wait on the ledge for the motivation to go back upstairs and find Natalia, but I’m distracted by thoughts of different places to study and being a beginner artist and how to be myself until my chewing gum has gone tough and gross. I spit it out and realise I need to pee. I can’t remember any toilets in the gallery, so I go to the 7-Eleven at the intersection, and when I come out I turn left, instead of back towards the gallery.

I don’t know what happens, but my feet take me up the street until I reach the tram stop. I’m on a tram, heading for the train station before I even realise that I’ve left the opening and I’m not going back.

DAY 55

The world glows green when I wake up, still surrounded by pillowy softness. I might have been asleep for a thousand years and even though I try to blink away the fuzziness, still my eyelids won’t stay open.

‘You talk in your sleep, did you know that?’ Yin’s voice, close to me.

I smile without opening my eyes.

Her mat is close enough that our sleeping bags brush together with a whisper. The morning sun creeps through the thin tent walls, our secret grotto, our private place, two girls sitting inside a cave made of curled leaves and petals.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ says Yin. Her voice is older, sadder. ‘Nat. I’ve been waiting so long.’

I wake with a lurch, wake with Yin’s voice right in my ear. My heart beats a sickening pitter-patter and her voice keeps reverberating in my head.

My sheets are tangled, I’m sticky with sweat. I can tell from the grey light seeping around the edges of my bedroom curtains that I’ve woken way too early. Liv and Naomi dropped me off late last night, after post-exhibition pizza and gelato, and I stayed up even later watching videos in bed.

You’re awake, I tell myself, you’re awake in your room and it’s now and not then and Yin is not whispering in your ear and she’s not even here anymore. So why did her voice sound so real?

I throw off my doona and sit up, hoping to shock myself into wakefulness, into reality. You can make up your mind what to feel but then your traitorous brain will lift the gate and let the monsters in while you sleep.

I dig my nails into my arm until I am back in my body, back with it.

I can’t have dreams like this, I can’t.

I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but when I pad out to the landing with my hair mussed up, still in my disgusting sweaty pyjamas, desperate for juice and toast and coffee and daylight and normalness, I can hear Mum’s voice and something about it is so instantly secretive that I know to creep.

I skip the squeaky stairs, I’m silent as a mouse as I crouch at the bottom, Mum only metres away in the kitchen. I sit my butt down.

‘…working from home today,’ she says.

Her soft tone means it’s a personal call; she has an entirely different voice that she uses for work.

‘I’m a little worried about her…keep an eye on things… uh huh, uh huh…’

I wish for a rubbery extendable neck that could wrap around the corner like a periscope. Worried about who? Me? Liv? Grandma?

‘Have you heard much from Allison?’

Aha. She’s talking to Ally’s mum.

‘I still remember my first time in Italy,’ Mum says. ‘The food. The men!’

I roll my eyes. Get a grip, horny old lady.

‘I think it’s been hard for her, with all her friends out of town. We were supposed to go down to the beach house, but work took over…’

I grip the carpet beneath me. She’s talking about me, behind my back, to Ally’s mum.

‘It’s more than that though. She’s erratic, moody…I don’t know. She’s not being herself and she won’t talk to me at all…’

There’s silence as Ally’s mum weighs in on my craziness, my inability to be myself.

‘There’s my therapist,’ says Mum, ‘I did wonder…’

I’ve heard enough. I walk back upstairs, not bothering to be nearly as careful this time. Fury rises up in me. I go to my bathroom, splash my face with cold water, splash it into my mouth too and spit it out, but a scream still wells up.

I shut my bedroom door.

How many of her friends has she been calling to talk about my moods? Sarah’s mum too? The whole neighbourhood?

I grab my pillow and scream into it, dig my fingers in and gouge just like we learnt to do in self-defence class.

After pummelling my fingers I sit very still on the edge of my bed until my boiling blood subsides. I scroll on my phone, looking at photos of the traitors Sarah and Ally in Florence, posing sluttily in front of the Uffizi, attending a paper marbling workshop—of all the things they would not